Agrium earnings call: Q2 2013

Ron Wilkinson (Senior VP / President of Wholesale Business Unit) clarified Agrium’s current plans for the Borger expansion project on today’s earnings call:

As far as our brownfield nitrogen project goes at our [Borger] facility, we’re continuing to develop that. We’re progressing engineering quite well to the point where we’re going to have a class 2 estimate either late third quarter and early fourth quarter. And we are continually testing the economics of the project. But it looks good at this point. And all going well, we’ll be going to our board for a full approval at the end of the year and then that project would be starting up either late 2015, early 2016.

He went on to talk about all these ammonia capacity expansion announcements:

As far as the overall market goes and all these announcements, I think you have to stand back and say, which ones are supported by strong balance sheets and which ones are promoters out there with a great idea. We do think a number of these will get built and you can just look at the big players that have made announcements and are progressing projects. But we don’t see, I’ll say, the vast majority, the smaller ones progressing. At the end of the day, we think that North America will still likely be in a import situation for urea. There may be times of the year where there are slight exports over the Gulf. But overall, we expect it to be still be an importer.